News and views about legal academia and the legal profession by Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) and Dan Filler (Drexel University)

October 19, 2008

HLS in the Boston Globe

By the way, a standard definition of "gossip" is talk or rumor about the personal or private affairs of others, often of a sensational nature. There's none of that here. Professional news (not rumor) is not gossip. Try 'Above the Law' for genuine legal gossip.

October 16, 2008

Mosteller from Duke to North Carolina

Robert Mosteller, a leading authority on the law of evidence and longtime professor of law at Duke University, has accepted a new Chair on the law faculty at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I can not recall the last time a senior faculty member moved from Duke to UNC.

October 15, 2008

Case Western Dean Simson to Step Down After Only Two Years at the Helm

The Case Western press release is here. Dean Simson was in the news quite a bit not long ago calling for a boycott of U.S. News. Simson is not the first rather short-tenure Dean for Case Western; in the late 1990s, the constitutional law scholar Michael Gerhardt (North Carolina) served as Dean for only a bit more than a year, before stepping down and then leaving the faculty. Any new Dean at Case Western will obviously want to know whether these cases are sui generis, or whether they reflect more deep-seated institutional issues (e.g., law school/central university relations).

October 12, 2008

The Financial Crisis May Mean an Increase in Applications to Top Law Schools

Wall Street recruiters have canceled or postponed visits to elite universities like Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, citing the turmoil in the markets.

“Jobs are being taken down by the day on our career services Web site,” said Kenton Murray, 20, a senior at Princeton, where J. P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank and others canceled recruitment sessions since the start of the semester....

Mr. Murray described the mood at Princeton as cautiously optimistic.

“No one I’ve talked to is worried about moving back home yet,” he said. “But everyone I know is studying for the LSATs right now, people who a month ago had no intention of ever going to law school.”

October 9, 2008

Blogging Scholarly Events at a Law School

We're trying a new experiment on the University of Chicago Faculty Blog, inviting select students to 'blog' about workshops and intellectual events at the Law School. This is an effort to stimulate a wider scholarly discussion and also give others--prospective students, alumni, scholars elsewhere--a flavor for some of what goes on here. The first post in that vein is now up, and it covers a session of the Law & Philosophy Workshop. The blogger is Alex Kolod, one of our excellent students in the Law School, who also studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Chicago. She has done a nice job, I think, covering the two-hour session and the discussion it generated.